Steven Johnson - The Infernal Machine S8 | E15

Summary

Radical Candor: Communication at Work

Episode: Steven Johnson – The Infernal Machine

Date: May 20, 2026
Host: Kim Scott
Guest: Steven Johnson (author of The Infernal Machine, creator of NotebookLM)
Season 8, Episode 15

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Episode Overview

This episode features an engaging conversation between Kim Scott and Steven Johnson, diving deep into Johnson’s acclaimed book, The Infernal Machine. The discussion explores the history of anarchism, the interplay of violence and political philosophy, the roots of bottom-up management and societal organization, and their legacies in today’s culture—including tech and Silicon Valley. The narrative weaves together historical storytelling, present-day relevance, and reflections on how societies could—and might still—choose nonviolence over violence in the face of unrest.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Why Write The Infernal Machine?

• Johnson’s Writing Journey: (02:53)
  • Johnson describes being drawn to "histories that weave together narrative events," aiming to highlight overlooked or little-known episodes (like political bombings in early 20th-century New York).
  • He initially considered focusing on Joseph Ferraud, a pivotal police detective who brought European forensic science to the NYPD, but decided the scope needed to be broader.
• Discovery of the Central Theme: (05:36)
  • Johnson noticed a recurring presence of bombings in New York City's early 1900s headlines, sparking his interest in understanding political violence's roots and its echoes today.

"It was just a regular experience in New York City from like 1900 to 1920... every week there was a political bomb."
— Steven Johnson (06:57)

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2. The Experiment We Never Ran: Anarchism and Nonviolence

• What If Anarchists Had Avoided Violence? (09:41)
  • Kim Scott opens with the book's central question: how history might have looked if anarchists had adopted nonviolent protest, akin to Gandhi or Martin Luther King, instead of terror tactics.
• Anarchism’s Reputation & Misconceptions: (10:11)
  • Johnson clarifies anarchism’s etymology—“no rulers”—arguing that the negative connotation arose because of its association with violence.
  • There's a branding failure: "They turned the word against their cause." (10:29)
• Historical Context: (11:32)
  • In the late 19th/early 20th century, anarchism was, at times, more influential than communism among radical philosophies.
  • For complex reasons, anarchism faded while communism became the main alternative to capitalism.

"Had the anarchists in that period developed a different way of getting their message...instead of just blowing things up...we might have had a very different 20th century."
— Steven Johnson (12:24)

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3. Peter Kropotkin, Watchmakers, and the Case for Mutual Aid

• The Watchmakers in Switzerland: (13:06)
  • Johnson recounts how Kropotkin—central to anarchist philosophy—was inspired by watchmakers’ guilds in Switzerland: non-hierarchical, technologically advanced collectives collaborating without centralized authority.
  • This was reflected in Kropotkin’s idea of “mutual aid”—that cooperation, not just competition, is foundational for both survival and societal flourishing. (15:06)
• Parallels to Modern Tech: (17:54)
  • The idea resonates with Silicon Valley's early ethos (and Adam Smith's critique of monopolies), reflecting a belief in bottom-up innovation and the dangers of concentrated power (public or private).

"Nature—the fittest—know how to cooperate more than to compete."
— Kim Scott (15:02)

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4. The Tragic Irony of Revolutionary Ideals

• Kropotkin’s Life and Aftermath: (19:58)
  • Despite his ideals, Kropotkin's work surveying Siberia unintentionally enabled the expansion of state control (e.g., the Trans-Siberian Railway and eventually the Gulag system).
  • Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman (prominent anarchists) are shaped by Kropotkin's philosophy but eventually become entangled in violence; both are ultimately exiled from the Soviet Union after becoming disillusioned with it. (21:57)
• Modern Parallels in Tech: (22:38)
  • Scott draws analogies with Google and Apple, where bottom-up visions often become thwarted by emergent concentration of power, despite idealistic beginnings.

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5. Bottom-Up Systems and Silicon Valley

• Self-Organizing Systems: (24:33)
  • Johnson connects the anarchist thread to his earlier work (e.g., Emergence), noting that systems like Google’s search algorithm are inherently bottom-up rather than top-down structures.
• Personal Anecdotes:
  • Johnson and Scott swap stories about early Google, its idealistic founding, and the sometimes unforeseen outcomes as systems scale and centralize.
  • Anecdote: Johnson recalls telling Larry and Sergey he would mention Google in a talk before they became famous (26:25).

"The way Google decided to organize all the world's information was...to let the organization emerge out of that bottom up system..."
— Steven Johnson (25:08)

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6. The Evolution of Violence: Pinkerton, Nobel, and Dynamite

• Allan Pinkerton’s Arc: (27:32)
  • Originally a progressive fighting for voting rights, Pinkerton's detective agency is eventually co-opted by big corporations for union-busting and strike-breaking, epitomized by the Homestead Strike.
• Dynamite’s Double-Edged Sword: (32:07)
  • Nobel's invention was intended for industrial progress but soon became “a democratizing technology” for violence—allowing even small radical groups to wield disproportional destructive power.
  • Nobel believed, naively, that such powerful explosives would deter war (“mutually assured destruction”), but reality proved otherwise.

"Almost as soon as dynamite becomes available...political radicals, most of them anarchists, say—this allows us to suddenly have a disproportionate amount of force at our hands without having an army..."
— Steven Johnson (35:56)

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7. Media, Outrage, and the Spread of Political Violence

• Media Amplifies Violence: (38:11)
  • The rise of rapid global news (telegraphs, undersea cables) gave acts of violence outsized impact, broadcasting attacks far and wide.
• Ludlow Massacre & Siege of Tarrytown: (39:12)
  • The violence wasn’t only from radicals; industrialists (like Rockefeller Jr.) and hired muscle (Pinkerton, strikebreakers) engaged in brutal suppression of labor.
  • Johnson details the accidental bombing in a NYC apartment, aiming to attack Rockefeller’s estate, and notes the mass public mourning for the perpetrators—a striking contrast to contemporary sensibilities. (43:13)

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8. Lessons, Warnings, and Hopes for Today

• A More Violent Past: (43:32)
  • Johnson urges listeners to recognize that, historically, political violence and polarization were far worse than in recent decades—a fact often forgotten in contemporary discourse.
• Embracing Nonviolent Change: (44:44)
  • Kim Scott reframes the central question: it’s not too late to run the "nonviolent anarchism" experiment, in life, society, or business.
  • Johnson closes on a hopeful note, encouraging belief in the capacity for rapid, radical change—for better or worse.

"Societies back then were capable of radical change...you can reinvent things and that remains true today."
— Steven Johnson (45:52)

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Notable Quotes and Moments

• "One of the worst political branding strategies, like they turned the word [anarchism] against their cause in a strange way."
  — Steven Johnson (10:29)

• "I never really have thought of Adam Smith as an anarchist, but there you go. Your book made me think of him in that light."
  — Kim Scott (18:42)

• "There’s a kind of tragic irony to the arc of his life..."
  — Steven Johnson, on Kropotkin (19:58)

• "What kid is not going to be excited by an explosion?"
  — Kim Scott (33:31)

• "It was a very different time...when thousands of people would descend onto Union Square in solidarity with those building a bomb to blow someone up."
  — Steven Johnson (43:31)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Time | Topic | |-------|--------------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:53 | Johnson's motivation for writing The Infernal Machine | | 09:41 | What if anarchists chose nonviolent protest? (Essential question) | | 13:06 | Swiss watchmakers & Kropotkin’s vision of anarchism | | 19:58 | Kropotkin's legacy and historical irony | | 24:33 | Anarchism, bottom-up systems, and Silicon Valley parallels | | 27:32 | Pinkerton’s idealism to strikebreaker transformation | | 32:07 | The invention of dynamite and its unintended consequences | | 38:11 | Media’s role in amplifying violence | | 39:12 | Ludlow Massacre, Tarrytown siege, and accidental bombings | | 43:32 | Remembering how much violence was normalized in the past | | 44:44 | Final thoughts: Nonviolent revolutionary change is still possible |

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Episode Tone & Takeaways

• The tone is reflective, insightful, and occasionally wry—both Johnson and Scott blend storytelling with urgent, contemporary relevance.
• There is a through-line of hope: that we can learn from history, and it’s not too late to build more just, innovative societies—and organizations—by choosing cooperation and nonviolence over destructive impulses.

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This episode is essential listening for leaders, history buffs, and anyone interested in how the philosophical struggles of the past still reverberate in our workplaces and world today.

Transcript

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[Kim Scott]

And welcome to the Radical Sabbatical. I'm Kim Scott and I'm interviewing the authors of books that I love, which is tons of fun. With me today is Stephen Johnson, who is the author of an incredible book that I have read twice. I'll show it to you. It's on my Libro fm, the Infernal Machine. So I recommend it highly. Stephen is also famous. Yeah, there you go. The hard. The hardback. I listen to everything now. Stephen is also the creator of NotebookLM. So welcome Stephen. I'm thrilled to have you today.

[Stephen Johnson]

Oh Kim, it's so great to be here.

[Kim Scott]

Tons of fun and my, my brain was exploding both times I read your book because it's rare to read a history that feels so relevant to today on so many dimensions. It's relevant in terms of sort of political, economic violence, which we see seems to be on the rise. Unfortunately, it's relevant in terms of surveillance, which also seems to be on the rise. And it's relevant, tying it in a radical candor. And it's so relevant to the kind of bottoms up management that I believe in that I learned a lot about working at Google. In some senses, I feel like Silicon Valley. There's a strong strain of anarchism here, maybe without the dynamite, without the Infernal Machine. And hopefully we can keep it that way. So thank you for writing this book.

[Stephen Johnson]

Oh, thank you for saying all that. That's lovely. It's amazing to hear that as an author.

[Kim Scott]

What prompted you to write it?

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah, it's a really interesting question and it's a good example of an idea taking kind of several years to really come into shape. Which is another thing I've written about in the past, which is this thing I call the slow hunch.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

So in my books, over my career, I've kind of bounced back and forth between writing kind of idea books and smart self help kind of books and then these multidisciplinary histories that kind of weave together a bunch of different narrative events from history that are more storytelling books. And those are my favorite ones to write.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah, the storytelling in this book is incredible.

[Stephen Johnson]

It was really. So I've gotten kind of like default now to trying to find plots that are interesting in historical events that. And I have avoided writing books where it's like a well known event. A lot of like historical books are kind of like, hey, this is this thing called the Civil War, and I'm going to write a book about it. And yeah, I tend to be like, here's this thing you've never heard of. Yeah, yeah, here's a book about it. Which is not always the best recipe for selling books, but for me intellectually, it's an amazing thing to get to do. And so I had written the last one in this genre was a book called the Enemy of All Mankind, about pirates. And it was set in kind of the 1690s, but it was on some level a kind of a true crime book. I mean, it's about the birth of modern global capitalism and all these other things, but it had a kind of particularly heinous crime at the center of it. And so you could play the pirates and other kind of popular narrative things. So I was. So I was looking around for something equivalent to that that I could write. And I also had in the back of my mind that I wanted to finally write a New York book because I'd lived most of my life in New York and I actually had. I'd written more about London than I had written about New York. So those were in the back of my mind. And I started thinking about like the kind of the invention of kind of modern policing and detective work. And I stumbled across this figure who's a major figure in the book, but became less relevant over time, which is this. This detective named Joseph Ferro who kind of brought over the modern forensic science from Europe around the turn of the century to the nypd, which include fingerprinting, you know, taking photographs of criminals, and basically like developing indexing systems so that you could keep track of all that information.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah, there you go. Like ping, ping, ping, ping, ping.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah, Ye just All these amazing things. And so it's like biometrics and like, you know, search algorithms, but in 1905 in the lower east side, and he had been involved in this case with this serial killer named Hans Schmidt. And so I was like, okay, well, maybe I'll write a book about Ferraud and anchor it in this one case. And so I wrote a whole proposal for that book and it was just like it was a little too small for my taste. And honestly for my editor's taste too. When I shared it with them, it felt like it didn't quite feel like a Steven Johnson book. And then it was kind of a single thread rather than multiple threads. And I had noticed in researching it that there was. As I was going through all the old newspaper archives, there was this recurring thing that kept happening in New York in that period, which is that people just kept setting off these bombs. Yeah. So I was kind of researching about the serial killer, but it was like the other article would be like, terrorists attack, you know, a synagogue somewhere and blow up it up, or they set up, you know, the, the attack the police department with bombs. And I began to realize like, that there were just. It was just a regular experience in New York city from like 1900 to 1920 that like. Yeah, every week there was a political bomb.

[Kim Scott]

There was a bomb. Yeah, yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

And you know, it was having lived in New York for so long and having, you know, seen the, the like crime problem go down. I moved at the kind of the height of the crime problem in 1990 and you know, the murder rate was at the highest it's ever was. And watching it go in the incredible transformation of New York, which not coincidence that I moved and the crime started going down. Secretly a crime fighter. But anyway, so I thought, wow, this is amazing. We forget like how violent it was and how in our age of like I was thinking about this in 2021 or something like this. So, you know, I was. It was. There was kind of the beginnings of political violence starting to pop up again. And maybe this was actually pre January, 6 actually, I think so it was even.

[Kim Scott]

Well, I mean. And you did live through. You did live through 9 11, which was.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah.

[Kim Scott]

Obvious.

[Stephen Johnson]

Totally. Yeah, we were.

[Kim Scott]

I was living there then too.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah, we had a three day old baby and we were living in the West Village. The planes like first plane flew right over our house.

[Kim Scott]

I had a startup in the West Village.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah, we should have been hanging out anyhow. So I started to think like, maybe, you know, what's the story behind all These bombs. Right. And so then I started thinking about anarchism, which we'll talk about, and how it got bound up in all this. And I also started thinking about dynamite.

[Kim Scott]

Yes.

[Stephen Johnson]

And that led me back to Nobel inventing dynamite. And then suddenly I had these three different threads converging.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah. And they're braided together brilliantly. Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

It took a long time.

[Kim Scott]

And unexpectedly.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah. Yeah. It's almost like three. You could write three separate. I mean, Nobel's career is so interesting that I briefly was like, should I just drop all this and write a biography of Nobel? Because it's such a crazy story. But anyway, that's how it came about.

[Kim Scott]

I love it. Well, I want to start in the Jarl Mountains. But before we jump into the Watchmakers in the Mountains, you end the book with a question that I want to start the interview with, because I want to keep coming back to it, which is like, what might have happened in the 20th century if the anarchists had taken a page out of Gandhi's book or Martin Luther King's book and not resorted to violence? Because it seems like if they had done that, maybe, maybe the person who threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house the other day wouldn't have done it. Maybe the CEO of United Healthcare wouldn't have been shot. Like, maybe, maybe we would have learned how to express Bottoms up anger in a more productive way. So you don't have to answer that

[Stephen Johnson]

question now, but I do need to

[Kim Scott]

by the end, but address it a little bit. And then, and then we'll go to the Jarl Mountains, to the watchful watchmakers there.

[Stephen Johnson]

I mean, one of the things that, you know, I kind of say at the beginning of the book is the, you know, if you look at its actual etymology, anarchism, it just means like no rulers, no leaders. It doesn't. It actually has. No. There's always this thing that people say about anarchism, like, why did they give their movement such a terrible negative name?

[Kim Scott]

Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

And it's like, it didn't have a negative connotation. It just meant like leaderless, like, you know, kind of bottom up, as you say, rather than top down command. And. Yeah, and it developed the negative connotation because the people who call themselves anarchists

[Kim Scott]

kept blowing, throwing dynamite.

[Stephen Johnson]

Throwing dynamite. And it became, now we say, oh, it's anarchy in there, meaning, ah, it's chaos and bad. It's very rarely used in a positive way. And so it was, as I say in the book, it was kind of like One of the worst political branding strategies, like they turned the word against their cause in a strange way. And that, you know, that as I said, as you mentioned at the end, I kind of said like, that didn't necessarily have to happen.

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Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

And the other thought experiment, in terms of like how the 20th century and 21st century could have played out differently is there was a period of time in the late 19th century where, you know, a reasonable person could say that anarchism was among the radical philosophies, among the kind of anti capitalist philosophies or anti, kind of industrialist, Gilded age.

[Kim Scott]

I'm not sure it's anti capitalist.

[Stephen Johnson]

No, no, no, we'll get to that. Yes, yes.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah, let's get to that.

[Stephen Johnson]

Anti big corporate capitalism.

[Kim Scott]

Anti power, anti somebody controlling everything, whether it is a big government or a big company.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yes.

[Kim Scott]

Whether it's a monopoly or a, you know, whoever has a monopoly on power.

[Stephen Johnson]

But the, the, there is a point in the late 19th, early 20th century where you could argue that anarchism was a more influential philosophy, radical philosophy than communism was.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah, yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

And, and for whatever, for a complicated set of reasons which are somewhat addressed in the book. But you'd also have to tell the whole history of communism and socialism. But for whatever reason, by the 20th century, the opposition became between capitalism and communism and anarchism kind of dropped out of the equation as a, as a, you know, it shows up in the, you know, Spanish Civil War and a few other places. But it really, it's always kind of a fringe player after that. And so had the anarchists in that period developed a different way of getting their message in front of people instead of just blowing things up.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

That we might have had a very different 20th century.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah. And it's not too late to run that experiment, by the way. Like that's, I guess that's part of why you wrote the book.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah.

[Kim Scott]

So, so when you were describing, early, early in the book, you're sort of describing the, the philosophy behind, explaining the philosophy behind anarchism. And you, you mentioned the watchmakers in Switzerland. Why, why that I have. And the reason why that struck me is that when we taught this class at Apple, what makes Apple Apple, we also told the story of.

[Stephen Johnson]

Really?

[Kim Scott]

Yes. Isn't that weird? So explain why you did it and I'll explain.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah, that's fascinating. So it really revolves around this guy, Peter Kropotkin, who is maybe the, maybe with Freud and Woods. The NYPD had the most sympathetic, fully sympathetic character in the book. It has a lot of Characters who you kind of identify with.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah, but you're like, I'm not so sure about that.

[Stephen Johnson]

But Kropotkin is kind of close to a hero of it in a way. And just, I mean one of those great. Again, another person one could write a whole book about.

[Kim Scott]

He was kind of the John Muir of Russia.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah, I mean he was so he, he was a, a brilliant kind of scientist. He, you know, discovered kind of literally redrew the map of Siberia by exploring it as a young man with an indigenous yak. Yeah. Guy and his, his. He becomes one of the kind of two or three kind of founding figures of anarchism as a movement. And in part it's from observing these remote communities living in this co. Evolutionary state with nature in the most inhospitable landscape you can possibly imagine. And kind of like, you know, far eastern Siberia. And recognizing that while they were incredibly removed from any state apparatus, they had figured out a way to like live harmoniously and survive in this in concert with each other and with, with the natural environment around them. And so he developed this, this kind of political philosophy that was tied to Darwin as well. And he developed this theory of kind of mutual aid which he saw among, in a sense, a competitive model to. Competitive model is the wrong way. It's a rival model to the survival of the fittest version of Darwinism where it's kind of like, yeah, there is competition, but more than that there's cooperation.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah. I mean nature the fittest know how to cooperate more than to compete.

[Stephen Johnson]

Right, exactly, exactly. And so he was seeing this all around him in the natural world. And he said, how do we think about human society following those same rules? This was a unified theory of nature and culture. It's really interesting stuff. And then he had, he was, he was briefly imprisoned, he was in and out of prison. And he was, though he was aristocratic by birth, he gave up his title. Gave, gave up his title. Anyway, just an incredible escapes from prison and this amazing story to be made about him. But in part of his journeys in kind of in exile, he visits these kind of small towns in the mountains in Switzerland and saw these watchmaking kind of guilds or collectives. And it was, it was really important for Kropotkin because it was again an example of a kind of non hierarchical organization like he had seen in these other places. But they were watchmakers. So they were actually doing very technological, you know, for the, this is 1875 or something like that. They're doing some very technologically advanced work like, you know, precision Engineering and things

[Kim Scott]

like that, I mean, they had dominated the industry for 300 years.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah, yeah. So, so there was this kind of collective knowledge and collaborative work that was capable of doing technological innovation and advanced work. It wasn't like you had to just, if you wanted to live in a less hierarchical society, you had to give up on technological progress. It was like, no, actually you can do it if you do, if you structure it. Right. And so that became the model for almost everything you wrote. And again, this is one of these things that is lost in the conventional, the contemporary understanding of what anarchism was. So what it really, the kind of Kropotkin's vision was that we kind of had peaked in those, you know, kind of like Renaissance hill town, Italian cultures and the Jura mountain collectives, where it's smaller communities still doing important scientific work and creative work and technological work, but less about giant states and less about giant corporations and more about these guilds and collectives and things like that. And he was like, that was actually the best configuration for human settlements and for human, you know, ingenuity.

[Kim Scott]

Right.

[Stephen Johnson]

And the world he was, when he was writing this in the 1880s, 1890s, the world was still filled with examples of this.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

And so it's like, yes, there are these new factories and yes, there are these palaces and yes, there's these giant corporations, but we also still have, have all these small little collectives that are out there. So why don't we just do more of those and try and steer society towards that kind of structure. And that was the argument that, that he was making.

[Kim Scott]

So, so this is so interesting. At Apple University, it was, it was not Kropotkin who was invoked, but, but rather Adam Smith who also studied the watchmakers and the, and that's like weird division of labor. And, but it has always struck and I tried to reread the wealth of nations, it was so boring, I couldn't get through it. So I'm going to use Notebook LM to. But, but anyway, it has always struck me that a big part of what Adam Smith was objecting to in the wealth of nations was monopoly, essentially. But, but state, you know, controlled monopoly. But also bit part of the problem with the state controlled monopoly was that, that it was giving too much power to, to, you know, the, the, the nobles of the time.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah.

[Kim Scott]

And, and that was killing innovation and killing entrepreneurship. So, you know, I never really have thought of Adam Smith as an anarchist, but there you go. Your book made me think of him in that light. So anyway, I Mean, and the other thing that was so interesting about your description of. Of Kropotkin for me is I actually spent some time in Yakutia when I lived in Russia because I was working in the diamond business and that' that is such a hostile. Like 3/4 of Yakutia is north of the Arctic Circle. It is really cold. It's incredible that people lived there as long as they did anyway. So one of the harsh ironies of Kropotkin's life is that he was all about this bottoms up, you know, anti totalitarian, anti command and control. And yet his. His exploration of Siberia made the Siberian railroad possible which made, you know, a lot of other state control, you know, and ultimately the Gulag Archipelago possible. Yeah, yeah, there's a.

[Stephen Johnson]

There's a. Yeah, there's a kind of tragic irony to the arc of his life and in fact, I mean giving away a little bit of the plot here. But, but basically the one we haven't mentioned is the kind of more prominent figures in the book that are kind of the centerpiece of the anarchist side are Emma Goldman, probably the most famous anarchist ever and her sometime lovers and kind of life partner Alexander Berkman.

[Kim Scott]

Yes.

[Stephen Johnson]

And they're both deeply shaped by Kropotkin although both of them get kind of pulled into the orbit of political violence in different ways and in complicated ways which Kropotkin mostly seems to have stayed outside of Although he did.

[Kim Scott]

He did sort of. He did say the ax is the propaganda and he seems to have soured

[Stephen Johnson]

on it faster than some of the others. But, but they. So they're deeply influenced. Berkman and Goldman are deeply influenced by Kropotkin. There's a kind of. One of my favorite sections of any of my books is this kind of little. What is it? Idol in the center of the book where Goldman finally meets Kropotkin in person goes to visit him in the suburbs outside of London. He's living in a little cottage, whatever but he's got a little workshop where he's making stuff and there's this whole long piece where they talk to each other and then I kind of muse about what this painting also. Yeah, so. But. But he. But Kropotkin ends up after the revolution going back to Russia and is. Is one of the first to kind of be disillusioned by it and to realize that it's not working out as.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

As they had hoped in this great radical revolutionary moment was actually creating more centralized power and yeah.

[Kim Scott]

The only way that they were able to grab Power was to become powerful and not.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah, and so then at the end of the book it really ends with Berkman and Goldman getting exported on the Red Arm. That's not deported, exiled, exiled or deported, but exported is a little, slightly different thing. And they go back and they visit Kropotkin again, again, you know, and kind of the whole last piece is those final days. It's really, it's an extraordinary story.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah, it really is. And, and the, I mean again, this is me maybe writing myself into your story in a weird way. So feel free to object.

[Stephen Johnson]

But that's why one writes books is the readers.

[Kim Scott]

Exactly. But the, the sort of struggle against, you know, we're trying to create these, these bottoms up ideas and these bottoms up technologies and somehow they turn into top down technologies and ideas. It feels to me very like when I decided to take the job at Google I read the S1 letter and like who tears up at an S1 letter? But I did at the time, you know, because it was such an expression. I mean I wouldn't say of anarchism but of bottoms up. You know, great ideas come from everywhere. We're not going to be controlled by Wall street, we're not going to be controlled by, you know, these powers that be. We're going to unleash human potential. Bottoms up human potential. You know, and I came in leading the AdSense team and I thought we were funding creativity a nickel at a time and we were talking about the long tail and of course, you know, I didn't understand for a while, I mean I came to understand it that really this was a rich get richer algorithm and, and that it, it funded the head and started the tail in, in ways that we didn't expect or intend. And so, and, and to a certain extent I also feel like Steve Jobs early on at Apple, you know, before he got fired the first time or the only time before he got moved out, he used to fly a pirate flag. You remember that? I'm sure you. Yeah. So there's this strong bottoms up sort of ethos in Silicon Valley that is, that is, that seems to, that voice seems to have been silenced right now and the, you know, founder mode seems to be ascendant.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah.

[Kim Scott]

You know, it's funny, did that strike you as you were writing this or am I just reading, reading?

[Stephen Johnson]

No, no, no, very much so. I mean the, the book of mine that kind of, this really is building on besides maybe the, the pirate book because of the crime themes is a book I wrote a million, my second book this Book called Emergence about self organizing systems and bottom up systems. It was called the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and software. And it was like self organizing systems. Jane Jacobs neighborhoods in New York and ant colonies don't really have leaders. They somehow managed to collectively solve problems. Just big romping kind of like idea science book. And that came out in 2001, right around when Google was just being ascended. And I have this memory of going to some conference still in the early days of Google. It's like they hadn't gone public yet, but they were making enough money that Sergey and Larry could sponsor something at the conference and they kind of showed up and I was going to mention in my talk about Emergence, I was going to be like, look, the way that Google decided to organize all the world's information was not to hire a bunch of librarians. The way Yahoo had it was to actually let the entire community of people who build web pages and decide to link from one page to another, let the organization emerge out of that bottom up system and that'll be a much more scalable way to do it. So it's very much kind of consonant with what I was writing about in Emergence. And I have this hilarious memory of like I was going to talk about Google in, in my talk and I saw, I, I say I saw Larry and Sergey. Like I know them, but I actually, yeah, I don't. This is actually the only time I've ever talked to them, even though I've been at Google now for four years. But I saw them and I was like, oh, hey guys, I'm gonna mention your little startup in my talk. So that should get some attention for your idea. You know, they're like, thanks, like weird authors, dude.

[Kim Scott]

That's amazing. Such a good story. Yeah, you, you, Google wouldn't be.

[Stephen Johnson]

I, I just, it was that solved

[Kim Scott]

crime in New York. You set Google on its path to success. Figure I didn't know that I was talking to Batman on this. I love it. So there's another story, there's another story in the book that feels super relevant to everything happening in the world right now, which is the career of Pinkerton. Can you talk a little bit about the. It was that, I mean and we can talk about Nobel and Dynamite too. But yeah, Pinkerton also. Really? That was, that was a, that was hard to read.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah, it's basically. Yeah. They kind of began as kind of like a progressive guy and starts this first kind of like famously Pinkerton detectives like yes. Detective Agency. And then slowly over time gets kind. The agency gets Co opted into basically doing strike breaking.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah. So they start out. So talk about how he starts.

[Stephen Johnson]

I can't remember how he starts.

[Kim Scott]

So Pinkerton, I think you've read the book more recently. Here's my memory. He started out his career fighting for voting rights.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Kim Scott]

For, you know, so fighting for democracy. Fighting for, you know, all people to have voting rights. And then he starts this company that. That initially was sort of protecting money as it was traveling across the country and winds up violently crushing workers. I mean, they're the ones who. Who I think were involved in the Ludlow massacre. Right.

[Stephen Johnson]

It's. No, the Homestead. Homestead strike. Yeah. Earlier.

[Kim Scott]

Okay.

[Stephen Johnson]

And yeah. They end up kind of being brought in by Frick and partially by Carnegie. It's unclear exactly how much Carnegie actually realized this was happening. To break up this strike outside of Pittsburgh. It's kind of one of the two with Ludlow. The two. It was just the anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre, by the way, One of the two most important, arguably kind of violent labor moments in the history of American society.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

And, you know, one of the things that. One of the things that's important. So there's that transformation of just getting pulled again into the orbit of this emergent kind of corporate strike breaking.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

You know, set of entities that just didn't exist 30 or 40 years before that.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

And the. And the kind of gravitational pull of that power, centralized power, that was hard to avoid even if you came into the world, as Pinkerton did, with more progressive aspirations. The other thing about it, and this is what is important to think about in terms of anarchism and Kropotkin that we were talking about before. So that landscape outside of Pittsburgh, one of the major industrial centers of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, had been transformed in just, you know, really a generation. Like, so the site of the homestead strike, where they have these giant factories. If you go back 20 years, it was just all farmland.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

And so part of the thing that we can't recreate now, that's harder to recreate mentally now is that, in a sense, the. The landscape of, you know, kind of large corporate or government kind of power has. Has kind of conquered the entire landscape.

[Kim Scott]

Yes. Yeah. It was not like. Like the ANP was the big enemy of the. Of the antitrust, like a grocery, a big grocery store, like.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah.

[Kim Scott]

That seems like the least of our worries.

[Stephen Johnson]

And so when you. When you walked into the. And the other thing that is partially out of our memory because it has. Has gotten much better, but, you know, it's it's important to remember just how dangerous it was to work in a factory at the end of the century. I mean, you know, and it's hard to find even the statistics I. A bunch of time trying to pull out just like, what your likelihood of being, like, either killed or maimed on a job.

[Kim Scott]

It was high.

[Stephen Johnson]

It was extremely high.

[Kim Scott]

Upton Sinclair wrote about it.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah.

[Kim Scott]

Marx wrote a lot about this. I mean, it was. It was terrible.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah. And so you were living in a world then where, you know, that reality you would go. If you went to one of the, you know, a steelworks or something like that, and you saw just the conditions and the. And the violence that was implicit to that kind of space at that moment in time. It was astonishing. But it was also still very new. Like, it.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

So there was this sense that, like, you know, now we might say, like, how could we possibly rewind the clock to, like, medieval Renaissance, like, guild structures? But back then it was like, no, it was just 20 years ago they were around here. Like, why don't we just rewind the clock 20 years? It's doable. So that's one of the things that's harder for us to kind of remember, conjure up today, I think.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah. So let's talk for a second about Nobel and his career. So Pinkerton, like, starts out as this idealist and. And also an author. He wrote detective fiction.

[Stephen Johnson]

Pinkerton, he's kind of true crime. He kind of invented true crime.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And. And then he winds up, like, starting this company that is repressing workers violently. How did that happen to the guy anyway? There's like a whole other. We could spend hours talking about that. But let's also talk about Nobel and his career. And then. And then what? You know, how dynamite created and exacerbated the violence of those of that era.

[Stephen Johnson]

It's one of these interesting stories where another key participant is an actual just like, chemical in the form of nitroglycerin.

[Kim Scott]

Yes. Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

Nitroglycerin has been discovered. It's kind of interesting, like the. In terms of explosive technology, literally the technology they use to make explosions, it was pretty much stagnant after the invention of gunpowder, like, for, you know, a thousand years or so. Right.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

There really weren't. There were, you know, improvements in efficiency and things like that, but it was fundamentally the same idea.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

And then they. We discovered this, you know, chemical nitroglycerin that in the kind of 1840s, and it was by far and away the most volatile thing anybody had ever stumbled across. And everybody who kind of messed with it either died or, like, lost a hand, you know, or whatever. Like. So basically, people are like, well, that's. There's just no way to tame this thing.

[Kim Scott]

It was the plutonium of its era.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

And. And. But Nobel, son of a kind of an arms merchant, bouncing back and forth between Stockholm and St. Petersburg, you know, has one of those childhood experiences where his. His teacher, science teacher's tutor, kind of shows him, like, a tiny bit of nitroglycerin and creates this amazing explosion in the lab. And he's like,

[Kim Scott]

what kid is not going to be excited by an explosion?

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah. It plants this seed that, like, literally changes the world in so many ways. And basically he's like, you know, that's so powerful. Like, if you could somehow tame it, if you could create. And there's a chapter in the book called this. The controlled explosion.

[Kim Scott]

Yes.

[Stephen Johnson]

Then you could reinvent industrial engineering, basically. So you have this whole thing that's happening with railroads being built and factories being built and tunnels being.

[Kim Scott]

And Manhattan being built.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah.

[Kim Scott]

All these things couldn't have been built without dynamite.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah. So there was suddenly this need for some technology that you could use to construct these extraordinary things. He was not. He thought it actually would be useless as a weapon.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

And he had a kind of mutually assured destruction theory about it was like, if people see how violent this thing is, they'll stop going to war because it will be just too dangerous. And that turns out. Right.

[Kim Scott]

Not so much. Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

So anyway, he labored to try and basically build the controlled explosion and suffered through these intense tragedies is his kid brother blew himself up in his home lab outside of Stockholm. Just working for his older brother, trying to, like, make some kind of nitroglycerin thing. And you, you know, another kind of person might have said, oh, shit, I just killed my brother. Maybe.

[Kim Scott]

Maybe I should stop. Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

Move on to another idea. But Nobel did not. And, you know, you question, like, how. What that means about him. But he eventually, he perfects this technique of creating a stable form of kind

[Kim Scott]

of a stable explosion. Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

Portable form in the form of, like, dynamite sticks. And he becomes fabulously wealthy, and it and everything that he imagined ends up happening. It turns out to be incredibly helpful. The world is built. Like, the transcontinental railroad is built. New York is built. All these things happen because of dynamite. But it turns out there's this other secondary effect of what he's invented, which is that it is a democratizing technology, and then it Gives a small group or an individual a disproportionate amount of power.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah, bottoms up violence. That was certainly not the intention was to create a mechanism for bottoms up violence. But that was the.

[Stephen Johnson]

Almost as soon as dynamite becomes available to the big industrial powers, a bunch of political radicals, most of them anarchists, say, oh, wait, this allows us to suddenly have a disproportionate amount of force at our hands without having an army, without having a Pinkerton squad of detectives. We can just throw a stick of dynamite into corporate headquarters and. And make. Make a name for ourselves.

[Kim Scott]

And now all of a sudden, it became very dangerous to be a political leader. Like, 48 heads of state were killed in that time. How many. Like, how many times did people try to kill Tsar Alexander, like that guy.

[Stephen Johnson]

It's funny that you were saying that you've been listening to the audiobook because I had a. So I wanted to mention Alexander II in the book because he's the first person to die in a suicide from a suicide bomber with dynamite. And so it was kind of important to set the stage for the book. And so it was one of those classic things where I was like, okay, so I want to have a paragraph about Alexander ii, so I need to know a little bit more about that. So I read a book about it, and then it turns out that it's such a crazy story because they tried to kill him like five different times, at least. Yeah, it's like the. I don't know, it's like. It's like something Roadrunner. And. Yeah, they're just all these, like, somewhat comical attempts that fail and he somehow survives again and again and again.

[Kim Scott]

And everybody is bumbling around. The police are bumbling. The anarchist who's supposed to blow him up over sleeps and misses his ch. Like.

[Stephen Johnson]

So I ended up changing the whole outline and I wrote two kind of set piece chapters on Alexander II and the kind of quest to kill Alexander II that ultimately culminates in this successful suicide bombing. And then it came time to read the audiobook, and I suddenly had two chapters of these absolutely unpronounceable Russian names. And I was like, why did I do this? This is such a thing. It was.

[Kim Scott]

So problem with reading the audiobook? Yeah, yeah, just use the first letter of the people's names and the Russian names.

[Stephen Johnson]

So the other thing that you know, is part of this as well is that you had the. The reason that this, you know, I put this in. In scare quotes, worked as a political strategy. The suicide bombers is also that you had an increasingly global connected press.

[Kim Scott]

Yes.

[Stephen Johnson]

And so you could blow up a building in Saint Petersburg and New York would know about it like 24 hours later. And that global reverberation was also part of the story that it would have been much harder to do something like this even 50 years before. Like you needed, you needed nitroglycerin to be conquered. You needed, you know, the telegraph and undersea cables to be set up and you needed the political philosophy. Yeah, but all those things converged.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah. So let's fast forward to how they converged in the Ludlow massacre and the siege of Tarrytown because. More dynamite. Like what? And describe the, the explosion that came out of that event.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah, so there's so, so basically the, there's a, there's a strike that happens in the Colorado minefields in, in 1914. 1913 to 1914. And again owned by Rockefeller. Owned by Rockefeller. And who is this is Rockefeller? Junior I think senior is still technically alive at this point. Yeah, Junior is kind of running the show and he has this giant estate up in Tarrytown north of North City. And they send in strike breakers to, to break up the strike. And they, they basically were. They'd kind of built a kind of a tent village outside the mine.

[Kim Scott]

The workers had the workers.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah, yeah, to prevent people from preventing scabs from coming in and taking over their jobs. And so they sent in people to basically, you know, send people out and they burned down the, the tent villages and ended up. Initially they thought there actually wasn't a lot of loss of life. And then it turned out they found this group of small young children and mothers who were kind of like buried underground and burned to death underground. And it was just a horrifying story.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah, we've talked a lot about the violence of the anarchists, but the violence of the, of the industrialists was pretty intense at this time as well.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah, that was the thing that they would always say in their defense, which was they. Yeah, if you look at the body

[Kim Scott]

count, I didn't start it. You started.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah, if you looked at and, and it was empirically true, like there were more, if you included industrial accidents and then, you know, kind of the strike breaking actions like Homestead, like Ludlow. It was undoubtedly true that there were more casualties at the hands of like the corporations than were at the hands of the radicals that, you know, you can figure out whether that makes sense, justifies any of it. Yeah, but, but that was the argument at the time. And so yeah, they're kind of at the center of the book. There's this bombing, that accidental bombing that actually happens that kind of. After Ludlow. There are all these protests. There's this kind of siege of Tarrytown led by. By Berkman where people kind of go up to upstate, up to Westchester and like protest. And there are kind of conflicts with the police, whatever. And then shortly after that on a. I think it was actually July 4th, the upper floors of a kind of upper. Kind of Spanish Harlem.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

Apartment building just blow up one morning. And it turns out there were a group of anarchists who were building bombs. In the apartment.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah. In the tenement building.

[Stephen Johnson]

And they had been. Apparently the story is that they had actually. Arguably still something somewhat unclear. They had with Berkman brought the. One of the bombs up to Tarrytown to try to blow up Rockefeller's estate.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

And took the train up there in the middle of the night. And then for whatever reason got rebuffed

[Kim Scott]

or they decided or they learned he

[Stephen Johnson]

wasn't there or he wasn't there. It was. No one really knows what happens where they come back and then they put.

[Kim Scott]

With the dynamite.

[Stephen Johnson]

With the dynamite there. You know, this would be an incredibly good television series.

[Kim Scott]

Yes.

[Stephen Johnson]

I mean, as you see how like that of Anakin is like.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

On the train with.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah. I mean. And you describe it. The visual description is incredible. So that package they're being weirdly careful with.

[Stephen Johnson]

And then, you know, this is. So they end up blowing themselves up. Berkman is not there and he kind of denies it, but also kind of celebrates the folks who did get blown up as kind of heroes. And then again as something to remind ourselves when we think about our particular moment in history. There's a rally in Union Square.

[Kim Scott]

Yeah.

[Stephen Johnson]

To kind of grieve the death of these political martyrs who were clearly like building a bomb to blow somebody else up. And thousands of people descend onto Union Square in solidarity with these folks who were clearly embracing political violence. And so it's just. It's just.

[Kim Scott]

It's a very different time.

[Stephen Johnson]

It was a very different time. And probably worth reminding us. It certainly is. We have something you don't hear enough, I think is a recognition that actually, you know, certainly until recently, you and I have lived through a period of kind of relatively unprecedented political peace and

[Kim Scott]

nonviolence with a shared commitment to non violence.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah.

[Kim Scott]

No matter how upset we are about it.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah. And I feel like when, you know, I just would hear a lot 10, 15 years ago about. Oh, politics is so polarized. You know, people used to say that before Social media before that, it was just something people always said. And I was like, actually, compared to what? Like compared to what period in history does this feel like it's polarized? Actually it's incredibly tranquil and civil compared to a lot of our history.

[Kim Scott]

I mean, the rhetoric is not maybe civil, but certainly. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's really important to remember the damage that got done to the philosophy by embracing violence. Like the work you ended with this question or this assertion, like the world never got to run that experiment.

[Stephen Johnson]

Well, that's kind of where we began in this conversation is like, you know, Gandhi was developing the ideas of, you know, nonviolent protest and civil disobedience. Like nonviolent disobedience. Right. When, you know, Berkman was plotting to blow up the Tarrytown estate and all these other things were happening. And so there was an alternate history. You can imagine where they get. They stumble across the same principle that Gandhi stumbles across and they don't use the diamond, it ends up going a different way. That is the experiment we never really got to run.

[Kim Scott]

Well, let's run it. So let's end on that note. Let's run that experiment. Let's figure out bottoms up. And in some senses, I think the best of right now, maybe the worst of Silicon Valley is grab the bullhorn. But at the best of Silicon Valley, I think we were kind of running that experiment. Experiment. It was a little bit more bottoms up and. And it wasn't violent.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah.

[Kim Scott]

So let's it maybe neither one of those things are true, as true today as they were 10 years ago, but let's make them true again.

[Stephen Johnson]

Yeah, I think that, that it's another, I suppose, message of the book is that societies back then were capable of radical change in one way or another. Like you can reinvent things and that remains true today.

[Kim Scott]

An excellent note on which to stop. We can change things quickly for the better or for the worse. Let's do it for the better.

[Stephen Johnson]

Agreed.

[Kim Scott]

All right, thank you so much. Great, great chatting with you, Stephen.

[Stephen Johnson]

Thanks, Kim.

[Kim Scott]

The Radical Candor podcast is based on

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the book Radical Be a Kick Ass

[Kim Scott]

Boss Without Losing youg Humanity by Kim Scott. The Radical Cander podcasting music was composed by Cliff Goldmacher. Follow us on LinkedIn Radical Candor the company and visit [e-mail]

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